1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, in which a formed image, for example, can be subjected to remote analysis, or the like, and relates to an image diagnostic method and an image diagnostic system for an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, an image diagnostic system is provided as service support for diagnosis of an image forming apparatus. The image diagnostic system aims to, at a remotely-located service center, analyze a user image in which a problem (image quality problem) has occurred, so as to rapidly resolve the problem. When such a problem occurs, the user makes a service call to the service center. The service center deals with the problem by telephone, and requests the user to output an image diagnostic chart and to provide a scanned image of the output chart. The user outputs the chart according to the instruction of the service center and transmits the scanned image to the service center. The service center analyzes the image transmitted by the user using the image diagnostic system to find the cause of the image quality problem of the user. Based on the analysis results, a service person carrying replacement parts is mobilized to the user's location. Thus, the image quality problem can be resolved with one instance of mobilization. Alternatively, in the case where replacement of parts is not necessary and the problem can be addressed by simply performing settings, calibration, and the like, it is possible to solve the problem quickly by the user performing such an operation. Also, a technique has been proposed in which, in the case where the target of maintenance is a malfunction that does not require part replacement, such as skewing and misregistration, automatic calibration is performed according to the diagnostics result obtained by printing a predetermined chart, scanning the printed chart, and transmitting it to a diagnostic apparatus, without intervention of the service person (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-176045).
Generally, in order to grasp the image quality problem of the user from such an output image, a plurality of images are necessary. Further, in order to correctly analyze the images, high quality image data is necessary, and therefore a large amount of image data is generally necessary for image diagnostics for one apparatus. Having a high resolution and a high tone is a condition for achieving high image quality, and due to the fact that image quality generally deteriorates when image compression is performed, a large amount of image data needs to be transmitted from the image forming apparatus to the service center for the image diagnostics. In order to limit the amount of image data, processing such as reducing the resolution of the images and increasing the compression rate needs to be performed, which incurs deterioration of the image quality. It is also conceivable to use a method of reducing the number of images, but if the number of images is improperly reduced, there is a possibility of missing the image quality problem being pointed out by the user. Therefore, it is difficult to reduce the amount of image data without a reduction in accuracy of the image diagnostics.